14 DAY TRIAL // A group of federal agencies, organizations, universities and research institutions in the United States announce that they will begin a 4-year collaborative effort to gain a deeper understanding of Earth's climate and the change it is going through.
The work will span 15 research projects, which will be funded with a total of $18 million. This will be an integrated approach to studying the planet and its cycles, as well as habitats, ecosystems and biodiversity.
At the end of the survey, experts expect to be able to make more informed decisions about how to protect endangered species. They also believe they will have access to more efficient means of ensuring that global warming is kept in check, and that it does not cause devastating effects worldwide.
The most important contributors to this endeavor are NASA, the US Geological Survey (USGS), the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Smithsonian Institution.
The money they will provide will help universities, private investigators and government agencies study the extent to which the changing climate is affecting ecosystems, as well as the wildlife and natural resources they contain.
More than 151 research proposals have been submitted for analysis, of which only the current 15 were selected as carrying the highest potential for useful scientific return. Results obtained from climate and biological studies will then be combined to create an unified view of the planet.
“We know very little about how the majority of species and ecosystems will respond to environmental changes related to changing climates,” explains the NASA Ecological Forecasting program manager, Woody Turnerin.
“These projects bring together NASA's global satellite data of the physical environment with ground-based data on specific species and ecosystems and computer modeling to detect and understand biological responses to climate,” he goes on to say.
“As a result, we will improve our management and mitigation of the impact of changing climate,” the official adds. The program he leads is based out of Washington, DC.
An important component of the research will be determining how habitats changed over the past 40 years. In order to two that, experts will select two consecutive, 20-year periods, and carry out comparative analysis between them.
The conclusions will help inform them about the direction in which our planet is heading, as far as its climate and ecosystems go.